


The Smile Stuck Between Your Teeth

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: Fantastic Four (Comicverse), Spider-Man (Comicverse)
Genre: Family, Family Bonding, Family Dinners, M/M, Married Life, No Plot/Plotless, Slice of Life, Spideytorch Week 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-19 09:44:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19972000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: They're only a few months past the promise of forever, but things continue to be on the up-and-up.-spideytorch week day five: family





	The Smile Stuck Between Your Teeth

**Author's Note:**

> i started writing this way before i ever found out abt spideytorch week so i was super stoked it lined up with today's prompt!! there's no discernible plot at all but there is a lot of sappy bullshit so please enjoy lmao

"Johnny."

He feels it in the back of his neck, letters picking at the fine hairs and little moles that cover his sunrise skin. 

_Mm?_

He tries to get it out, but his lips are sleep-pasted together and his eyes still stuck shut from one long, tawny eyelash to the next. Instead, he presses each line of his body into the plush memory-foam mattress topper that had been painstakingly handpicked some months before- from crooked fingers to cleft chin, brazen hip to soft thigh, faintly blond legs to delicate metatarsals, he sinks.

" _Johnny_ ," it comes out impossibly softer, thought with a sideways tilt of song and smile that makes Johnny grin into his down alternative pillow. His eyes remain shut, but he's surely awake, leaning back into a cold palm with an even colder band encircling it.

"Hm?" he finally manages to mumble out, a hand snaking out from under the pocket of perpetual warmth beneath the covers to push back the loose screw of hair dangling in front of his forehead. The A/C return blasts what he knows to be frigid air (which washes pleasantly over him like an island breeze) and he scoots himself farther back to be of use, letting the heat pool from him and slip around Peter, who is still buried in the back of his neck.

"You're snoring," Peter says as his voice dips back to its normal clip, and the dewy morning snaps around them, refocusing into something less fantasy and more plain fantastic.

Johnny laughs, soft and as blurry as his vision as he finally opens his eyes. "No, I'm not."

"I didn't realize you'd mastered the art of stasis."

"Honeymooning afforded me a lot of free time," he explains, craning over his bare shoulder to find Peter's mouth with his own. 

Peter's glasses, already on and already pissing Johnny off because he loves to see his husband post-sleep and pre-wakefulness-and-glasses, push against Johnny's brow and he relents. Only, of course, because he can make his dive to kiss at Peter's jaw with due cause.

He snaps a toned arm out and pinches Johnny's hip, shit-eating grin on his face. "You know you can only use the honeymoon excuse for-"

"Four more weeks, I'm thinking. After six months it's just tacky, right?"

"I'm sure Sue would argue the tackiness kicked in forty-eight hours after we got back."

"Wha'd'you think, though?" Johnny asks from beneath sunlight-threaded brows, perfectly scrunched together in painstaking care.

Peter taps at his hip, a soundless ask that Johnny quietly answers as he rolls to face him, broad nose bumping against the soft skin between his throat and chin. Peter's arm goes around his middle, rubbing small, rhythmic circles into Johnny's lower back amidst peach fuzz and constellation freckles spackled above the band of his boxers. "I think it's still got some steam," he acquiesces before dipping down for another kiss, otherwise occupying them for the better part of the next hour. 

When they part, Johnny slinks to the shower to the greetings of icy water (their water bill greatly appreciates his adversity to anything above 80°) and his "elaborate" hair care routine- Peter's words, not Johnny's. To be fair, Peter thinks conditioner is elaborate, so the data might be skewed.

Peter, on the otherhand, busies himself puttering around the kitchen with bare feet and sweatshirted shoulders. Between tugging down boxes of cereal - because neither of them ever took to eggs - and switching on the coffee pot, he reads the news alerts on his phone and the sparse text messages from his circle.

Tomorrow morning they'll swap places, and where there's fair-hair geared products there will be plain Head and Shoulders, and instead of texts from Gwen and MJ and Harry, it'll be Jen and Sue and Ben. But it will still be the same two men wearing the same two bands shuffling around the same hazy skyline backed kitchen radiating the same inescapable, giddy love muted only because of the early hour.

When Johnny makes his way into the kitchen, still tripping a towel through his hair while carefully trying not to upset his own pair of glasses, Peter doesn't look up from his rapid-fire correspondence. He frowns slightly at whatever is lighting up his screen - brows shifting and lip slipping between his teeth - but he pulls the stool beside him out with his socked foot all the same as his husband rounds the bar.

They crunch in verbal silence, spoons clinking against the sides of bright bowls they had spent two weeks deciding the pattern of. Johnny had always had those kind of things provided to him, never with his say, and usually in increasing shades of monochrome. Peter had never had a full set of dishes, let alone one that matched all the way around. Still, it was the first thing they bought Together, and the first thing that crossed the Storm-Parker threshold.

When the coffee's done, they rinse their bowls in the farmhouse sink and take steaming mugs out into the chilly air, only two degrees warmed from the temp it had been when they'd woken up an hour before. Johnny rests his NASA mug - a lonely remnant of his childhood - on the balcony's railing after taking his first sip. With his now free hands, he draws Peter into his chest and rests his cheek against the back of his wild-haired head.

Peter, though born and bred in the harshest parts of New York winters and overly used to the damage dealt by cold, takes the warmth Johnny offers without complaint. He's still wearing the same sweater he'd been weathering winters in since high school, but he's learned in the last handful and a half years of his life that blending befores and afters is better than okay.

For a long while, they remain quiet, breathing in the sharp air and the wave of waking the city is undergoing. They let the wind lick at their hair, the sounds around them engulfing them until they're enclosed in thick white noise. It's, undoubtedly, the most at peace either of them has ever been.

"What time do we have to be to Sue and Reed's again?" Peter asks, breaking the silence between his fingers. Johnny sits in the reverberations of his voice in his chest--eyes closed as something so malleable and at home spreads through his heart--before he ever thinks to answer, "Not until five."

Though they both know they'll go earlier, not for any other fact than to spend more time with the kids because Franklin and Val would probably kill Johnny if they knew he'd kept their new favorite uncle from them any longer than he'd had to.

It's only been five months since the wedding, three years since the mutual proposal that hadn't really looked like a proposal at all save for the rings, and however much past a decade they'd had this back and forth that Johnny found more comfort in than any home he'd ever had, and he can't help but still marvel at it. At the fact that he's taking a husband to a family dinner, that his sister hadn't given him the initial invite because she'd been on the phone with said husband anyway shooting the shit, that his niece and nephew love Peter so much Johnny wonders on a scale of one to him how close they lie to the latter end. At the fact that he's always loved his little family more than anything on this earth or the next or the alternate, but now he's got a branch all to himself that he finally doesn't mind nesting on.

"I've got a little work I need to get done," Peter says after another stretch of silence, head tucked against Johnny's sturdy shoulder.

Johnny exhales, presses one hand to the side of his head and a kiss to the other. "Me too," he adds, letting another kiss land near Peter's cheek, lighter and messier amongst stubble. "Ugh, dude, you need a shave."

Peter hiccups a loud laugh, shoving at Johnny's side, but he skirts out of the way, a dance they perfected years ago. Scampering footfalls and sunny-crested laughs later, Peter's in front of the monitor in his home office - which is more a section of the living room than anything - working on the photos from his and MJ's shoot over the weekend. She'd had to do a lot less pleading with her agent to get him on the project now that he has an actual business card to offer.

Flung on the couch behind him is Johnny with his laptop open and glasses pressed even farther up his nose as his fingers light the keys doing god knows what. It's not that he's secretive about his work - far from it, really, taking calls and replying to emails and typing in abundance anywhere he can get comfortable - but when anyone asks what he's up to, he cheerfully replies, "Rocket science," and goes back to his business. 

Usually, Peter peeks over his shoulder, their eyes tracking in tandem the lines of whatever project he's freelancing on any given day, pointing our errors and snarking their way through asides to pass the time. But that's when there's time to while, and today isn't one of those days.

In the pre-pre-dawn hours (or that's what they feel like, at least, though they are undoubtedly post-dawn and later, post-afternoon) they prepare their speech for the opening of their small photography exhibition (Peter) and edit an article for submission to the foil of every prestigious science journal while also trying to come up with increasingly inappropriate science jokes to text to their husband who is no more than ten feet away (Johnny.)

Bt the time they're done it's closing in on three o'clock and Peter stumbles his way through getting ready. Johnny stands outside the bathroom, contacts in, clothes ironed, finger crooked inside the neck of his coat where it's thrown over his shoulder. Leaned against the doorframe, he absently relieves small sparks from his palm as he listens in on the soft hum of Peter's music as he shaves the coarse hairs along the sides of his face, he snuffs the sparks and tries to keep deadly quiet while he works on that beneath his throat. 

Peter catches his eye out of the corner of the mirror, tipping him a sweet smile before he taps his razor against the sink basin and expels excess shave cream down the drain. 

"You missed some," Johnny calls, not looking up as he clicks another spark between his fingers. Still, there's a sly smile notched in his cupid's bow mouth.

Frowning, Peter turns this way and that, craning the long lines of his neck. He finally proclaims, "No, I didn't," which Johnny cheekily replies to with a, "Made you look."

Peter scoffs, though it burbles toward a laugh. "Asshole." 

Johnny grins.

It's another fifteen minutes of Peter trying to comb his hair (and flicking water at Johnny) and trying to get dressed (and Johnny grabbing him around the waist from behind, wrinkling both their outfits) but they do eventually make it out the front door and out onto the street below their apartment.

It's slammed sidewalk to sidewalk with people, everyone going in a thousand different ways that put them going against the grain. But Peter pushes ahead determined, shouldering a path through holi-dazed pedestrians that Johnny simply follows inside the lines to their subway entrance. 

Once they hit the platform, pace finally slowing, Johnny's able to take in the chapped feeling blooming across his face and the tingle climbing up his hands. He knows that if the cold is touching him, it must be wreaking havoc on Peter. 

Not that anyone would ever know that.

He stands at Johnny's side, keeping his toboggan tugged tight over his perpetually messy hair, his ears trapped beneath the ribbed brown fabric, and his mouth firmly shut. Still, Johnny can make out the goosebumps running up from the top of his spine and out his jacket collar, and see the way his jaw is tense as if that'll keep him from shivering. 

Once they step on the train Johnny draws Peter's left hand into his right and deposits them safely within his coat pocket, his lukewarm fingers bundled softly around Peter's frigid ones, slowly pressing warmth into them like the sea pressing into the sand.

Peter hitches a brow at him, but doesn't say anything as he burrows deeper into his scarf in a way that never fails to make Johnny's heart catch. He smiles, thumb rubbing over knobby knuckles and that gold band all the way to their stop.

It's a decently long ride that leaves them whiplashed and half-drunk by the time they emerge onto Sue and Reed's street, Peter complaining about vertigo and Johnny trying to remember how to walk straight. Nevertheless, they make it to the all too familiar front stoop in one piece.

From inside the house they hear, " _Reed, can you get the door_!" and each brace for impact, detaching their hands so as to be better equipped for when the door swings open and they are thrown into symbiotic relationships for the remainder of their stay. 

Before the door can even fully open, Franklin and Val have wormed their way out and clambered themselves into awaiting arms. Johnny laughs ecstatically as Franklin launches into a story he's been "holding onto for a while, Uncle Johnny, it had to be told face-to-face." Peter, on the other hand, has his face held still by Valeria's small hands, keeping his eyes trained forward as she exhaustively lists all the phrases she knows to describe how much she's missed him.

Reed's body catches up to his hand before they can start to freezerburn, and ushers them in as Sue calls out from the kitchen where she's manning something in a tall pot. Carrying a child a piece, they work their way in to greet her.

"Reed," Sue says, and it's enough, apparently, for him to pick up what she's putting down because soon he's in front of the pot and Johnny has his arms full of mother and son.

"It's good to see you," she says simply as Johnny plants a kiss to the top of her head, but he feels the way her hand tightens around his arm as if she can't steady herself and he knows he should call more. 

"Good to see you, too," he murmurs back, and hopes she knows he's saying _you and I'll talk after dinner._ It was a tradition they kept for Thanksgiving, and though it's not the day yet, it might as well be, and he just wants them to curl up in those stupid Adirondack chairs they keep on the roof of the building and talk 'til the sun comes up.

When she smiles up at him, half-teeth and half-lips, he knows she understands.

Apparently disinterested with his mom and uncle's unspoken agreements, Franklin wiggles down Johnny's side until his feet are firmly on the ground and he can go find his sister- who has broken free of Peter only far enough to show him what she'd been drawing at the coffee table in the living room. He sits on the floor, still bundled in his full attire, and nods along seriously as she explains something that would probably make even Johnny's head hurt. Wiz kid.

"We better go rescue him before he has a heat stroke," Sue says dutifully, but doesn't move a muscle, her arms crossed over her cashmere sweater and her head tilted fondly to the side.

Not to be left out, Johnny copies her stance, a head taller where he stands behind her, but no less striking in the eerie resemblance he conjures up. They're mirrored, down to the angle of their necks, but they can't find the humor for the intent they're pooling into the scene in front of them.

From the kitchen, it's a straight shot through a stubby arch to the living room which sprawls wide and open, perfect for adolescent occupation in shades of Crayola.

Peter sits amidst it all, his legs crossed beneath him and his face intent as he listens to Val, who has one hand set seriously on his shoulder and the other pointing out a picture of what seems to be Godzilla gifting a puppy a flower. Or possibly, a skyscraper with a zipline coming off of it. It could, of course, be someone throwing a tomato at a boulder. Whatever it is, Val had planned it down to the shade of red and is enthusiastically recounting every thought she'd had during her creative process to an enraptured Peter. He makes sure to ask his own questions, to congratulate and compliment in whatever breath he's given, and Johnny wants anything else in the world than to have to break the moment.

Franklin, who'd been occupied with his Legos just behind the pair, perks up at mention of something - what, no one can hear save for the trio - and leaves his toys discarded to totter over and interject himself in the moment between Val taking a breath and Peter trying to compute.

"Uncle Peter," he says loud enough to be heard by probably everyone in the building, and the ringing in Johnny's ears eclipses everything else around him as a smile bursts onto his face. 

Peter looks up and over at the blond boy, face screwed up into a small, disbelieving smile as he rests his hand between Franklin's shoulderblades and mumbles something unheard, but felt by the way the warm bass of his voice travels.

"Are you going to pass out?"

Johnny snaps back, blinking down at Sue who looks caught between fondness and devising how to tease the living hell out of him.

"I'm good."

She _hmm_ s in that way she does and titters back to the stove to take the spoon from Reed, sufficiently breaking the moment.

"Why don't you go get your husband dinner presentable, should be ready in a few." There's not room for debate, and so Johnny steps lightly until he can worm his way in.

He crouches quickly, pressing his palm to the back of Peter's neck and poking Val in the side with the other hand. "Dinner's about ready," he informs them, eliciting a raucous cheer from the kids that leaves him with enough time to dip into Peter's ear and murmur, "Go take you coat off, I've got the kids."

Peter nods once, extracting himself as painlessly as possible as Johnny starts questioning Val about her drawing. 

"It's a _gorilla_ ," she informs him after he mistakenly asks if it's a giant lizard, or the building it usually tears down. "We saw her at the zoo," she continues, as if Johnny is somehow the dumbest smart man she has ever met. "Those are the bamboo and that's the ants." 

He tilts his head slightly and- there. Now he sees it.

"That's really good, Val, when'd you guys go to the zoo?" 

It's, perhaps, the wrong thing to ask, because suddenly both his niece and nephew are clambering into his lap (despite being far too big to do that at once) and spitting out animal facts like it's their job. But it gives Peter his momentary out and allows Sue and Reed to finish dinner, while also letting him bask in how amazing these kids are, so he can't find a word of complaint.

"Tapirs get _how_ big?" Johnny demands, doing mental comparisons as Franklin and Val link hands and try to display six foot between their collective arm span.

"Hey, Ranger Rick," he hears, and his eyes bounce from the kids over to Peter, who's grinning at him and drumming his hands against the rounded board of the inside of the archway. "Dinner's on the table."

"You guys are gonna have to finish telling me all about this after dinner, all right?" he asks, looping an arm around each of them and hoisting them up in the air as he stands. "Okay?" he asks again, shaking them lightly enough to kickstart their laughing agreement.

"Okay!" Val cries, scrunched in half. "But dinner first!"

"Funny," Johnny says as he rounds the corner and deposits each of them to a chair. "I don't remember your mom's cooking being _that_ good-" but before he can finish Sue is smacking his arm affectionately. 

"I kept you alive, didn't I?" she shoots back as he flashes her a grin and ducks out of another swat. "Even if you were a 'growing teenage boy' for twenty-odd years," she mumbles in addition.

"What can I say, my metabolism was on fire."

"Dollar in the jar, Uncle Johnny!" Val proclaims with deadly precision as she brandishes her index finger at him in accusation. 

Franklin solemnly intones, "Fire pun free zone," as if he were delivering a guilty verdict to Elmo or Big Bird.

Peter snorts from the seat he'd already taken, slouching slightly before Johnny's glare can reach him as he folds the rest of his amusement into the creased palm of his hand.

"I'm just gonna put your Uncle Peter beside the jar, see if that doesn't settle us up for a while," he mutters, but there's no bite.

Franklin cheers at the prospect, his hands swinging wildly enough that he flings whatever had been on the end of his spoon at his sister. It smatters across her tastefully designed Paw Patrol t-shirt and she stops in her every movement to stare down him down. 

Johnny hadn't even seen Franklin pick up his spoon in the first place.

"Valeria," Reed starts evenly, but the girl snatches up her spoon and turns Franklin's dinosaur shirt into the next great extinction before another word can be said. Amazingly, though, after that not another pea is flung or drop of broth shot hotly across the table - they've come to an armistice, Johnny realizes. (Not for the first time, he looks at his niece and nephew and wonders about latent telepathic behaviors - Val shoots him a look and a giggle that chases a shiver up his spine, and he turns back to the bowl in front of him quietly.)

The rest of dinner clicks away, one slide after the next of caught-in-motion laughter and limbs tossed in storytelling of past days and passing weeks.

Between the might-as-well-be-newlyweds, though, there's an undercurrent of glances shot between each course, the slice of a mouth promising wildflower pressings once the hours have waned, feet kicked and kicking while faces screw up into neutrality. 

They are a mirror, of lined hands and lined hearts and grins so big they can't be hidden, even if they try. There's a love that drips over them like the soft storm clouds burgeoning a few miles away, slick and cleansing, resplendent as lightning arcing across the sky.

Everyone notices, it's hard not to, but none of them mind (though, admittedly, Sue doesn't protest when Peter offers the both of them to clean up the six times three plates' worth of dishes.)

"And try not to break what's left of the good china, huh, Johnny?" Sue calls after them as she wraps Franklin in a monstrous hug, and Reed in turn scoops up Val as she squeals in delight.

"I was eight years old, Susan!"

"Try eighteen!"

The kitchen is smaller than what Johnny got used to after living at the Baxter, and even now his and Peter's is more on the larger end, but his husband circles it with a simple ease, flicking the faucet on and rummaging around for dish soap while Johnny leans against the counter, awaiting direction. 

He hears a small _hup,_ and snatches the towel from the air before he even looks up, shaking his head at Peter's mumbled un-awe.

"Why don't you focus on not sticking to the china, webhead," Johnny clucks, tossing the towel over his shoulder the way he'd seen them do on Food Network in the dawning hours of their insomnie à deux. 

Peter folds his shoulders high, shading his smile like branches and leaves as he plunges his hands into the thick bubbles of the dishwater and sets to scrubbing, never even hissing at the water's temperature.

(Johnny likes to think he's taught him a thing or two about dealing with heat.)

They pass off each dish with care, Peter's hands almost slippery and Johnny's almost delicate as they methodically work their way through the stockpile to the side of the sink. The clattering of plates and utensils is all that accompanies their companionable silence, that and the elbows in the ribs and hips against hips and the anything but hands because they're working.

When they're done, Peter wrings his hands in the sides of Johnny's shirt as he brackets him against the counter and works a kiss into his mouth, chest to chest until they aren't and Johnny can't breathe.

"Let's go find everyone," Peter says mildly, looking far more collected than he has any right to, but suitably smug nevertheless.

"Mhm," Johnny agrees, his voice thin and tilting. "Just- I mean what's a couple more minutes without us, though?" he adds, already tugging him back in with a thumb pressed into the crook of his arm and a palm pressed against the sharpness of his elbow. Before Peter can (half-heartedly) protest, Johnny has his hands on the sides of his face, spinning warmth against his cheeks as he pulls him back in for another moment or two (or three.)

Johnny had gotten used to kissing Peter. They'd had this, in whatever way, for years now, had learned each other's mouths possibly a few weeks after they finally stopped bickering to try other pastimes and never really look back.

The thing of it was that Johnny never got _tired_ of kissing Peter. Not on fire escapes or atop Lady Liberty or while covered in grime and ash or after getting beat to hell and back by the monster of the week. Not while sitting on the couch or laying in bed or standing on Aunt May's front stoop or leaning against one another in Sue and Reed's kitchen.

Peter is comfortable and comfort and sometimes Johnny can't stand to leave the little place they have amongst the vast- and greatness of the universes for anything.

But sometimes nieces and nephews and in-laws of the sibling type burst your bubble to grinningly jeer at you for making out in their kitchen when the task you'd been dealt had long since ceased.

" _Gross_ ," Val calls, her syllables long and her tone so much like her mother's that Johnny cringes into himself out of sheer habit, his shoulders tucking inward as Peter's fingers spasm in the low-lying fruit of his hairline along his warm, golden neck.

"Guess someone's already had dessert," Sue chimes, her bare face blossoming into her shit-eating, older sister grin, gums exposed and freckles rising on her cheeks. Peter's mouth tugs hard, his nose and eyes screwed shut as he tries not to laugh in his husband's face.

Johnny cuts a hard glare at his sister, which just makes her mouth wider, her calloused hands passing over it before cutting through her hair the exact same way he does, shaking her long blond strands over her shoulder.

The heat in his face dissipates at the free look on hers, her chin tipping to the ceiling as her tongue peeks between a chipped teeth at his indignation.

"Well," she says, tipping her head to the side. "If you would be so kind as to cease and desist-"

"Yeah, yeah, we're coming, Sue-Sue," Johnny clucks, hands on Peter's sides to move him away. "We're with you."

"Mhm." She nods, but her eyes still spark with enough fire that Johnny can't help but remember when they swapped powers at the slightest touch. He's fire, sure, but Sue's always been made of the thickest smoke and the hottest coals.

The combined Storm-Richards family clambers from the kitchen after that, comments mumbled under their breaths that finish popping the bubble that had once gripped itself over their kitchen. 

But it's only once Sue's bare footsteps round the corner away from them that Peter turns to Johnny with shaking shoulders and mumbles, " _Busted,_ " in an only half in-key singsong before collapsing against him, laughter warm against the base of his throat.

Johnny folds his arms around him, pressing a lopsided kiss into his hair as he huffs along with him.

Later, once Franklin and Valeria have commandeered Peter and Reed for a rousing few rounds of Go Fish, Sue taps Johnny on the shoulder and with a wink and the promise of a drink, quietly motions him up to the rooftop.

They tread lightly until they break into the frigid night air, the door snapping open as the wind hauls it out of Sue's grip. But despite the steam hissing off Johnny's skin and the violent shivers wracking Sue, the night is inevitable.

The sound of Sue dragging two better-days-behind-them Adirondack chairs across the roof etches out a pattern for the lights in windows like stars and the white noise cascading from streets just beyond them. The moon and the sun are in tandem in the sky, not quite dusk or night or anything in between, either. Just there and welcoming to the two siblings.

"You wanna help me out?" Sue asks, motioning her head at the little fire pit between the chairs. All too eager, he obliges, hand on fire before she can even finish the question.

They settle in to the creaking chairs with ease, hands flung over the armrests cupping slick-glassed drinks and heads tipped back to a verging-on-non-existent sun. They are a field of sunflowers looking for warmth and finding nothing, but still climbing despite it all.

"How are things?" she asks after moments and moments of silence, and despite her vagueness, he knows what she means.

"They're-" An Exhale. "They're really good." A smile so loose and free it could claim independence from his features.

Though simple, his words are filled to and spilling over the brim with a love so thick it twist-ties his tongue and makes her flex her hands to stop the ache that thrums up her wrists and into the meaty flesh of her palms. 

She's spent years of their lives watching him project swift stability and an uncaring so bone-deep he almost turned inside out. But here and now he is simply a man, no longer a bronzed Atlas carrying the weight of the world, just happy and in love and free for the first time since they were excommunicated from the life they once lived.

It's hard not to smile, so she shoots it toward the buildings ahead of them and smothers it against the bottleneck in her hand.

He folds in on himself, legs pulled up and face pressed against the back of the chair to face her. "We wanna take Frankie and Val to do something this weekend or next- we miss them," he says, his eyelids shuttering through open and shut.

"They'd love that and you know it," she replies, looking over at him through the same eyelashes that brushed his pillow that morning. "God, Johnny, they love you two so much."

"And you know we love them."

"I know. I'm grateful."

They pass the time the way they always do, speaking in broken sentences and odd expressions and candy-lace laughter until the door swings open behind them and they startle, their hands stuck in the proverbial cookie jar.

"Sue, the kids're looking for you for bedtime," Peter says, still shoving his arms in his jacket. "Something about new expert testimony for why they should get more bedtime stories?"

Sue sighs a tired laugh that's no less happy than that of her brother's. "They also love their Auntie Jen," she tells Johnny as she swings her legs over the side of her chair. "Who decided to teach them about the law, but not bedtime story limits."

"They wouldn't love her so much if she had," Johnny says as Peter pipes in simply, "We could do it."

Sue quirks a brow. "You think you're up for that, Peter? They're a tough crowd."

"Aw, c'mon, Sue, I've been wrangling Storms with questionable taste since I was a teenager."

"Fair point," she says over Johnny's indignation as she totters through the door, leaving them alone one more time.

Peter extends a hand, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he turns his eyes to the sky, drenching his profile in half-lights and cosmos. "You coming or what?"

Johnny almost stays there, never seeing or touching, just watching, but he hasn't been able to resist Peter Parker since the day he first set eyes on him, though the type of temptation has changed year after year.

With an inhale, he makes his strides quick and neat, grabbing up Peter's hand to press a kiss to the back before dropping it in favor of racing him down the stairs. From behind him he hears a cry and a laugh. 

He feels full.

**Author's Note:**

> brazilian tapirs can reach weights up to 550lbs and lengths of six feet and yes i am both horrified and excited by the fact tht those funky little things are tht big (and also related to the rhino)
> 
> im on tumblr @foxmulldr and Constantly having a spideytorch breakdown so feel free to hmu!!


End file.
